With symptoms ranging from muscle pain to internal bleeding, this is one illness you definitely don't want to get! More
Sunday, October 21, 2012
Young people driving epidemic of prescription drug abuse
A
new study by the University of Colorado Denver reveals that today’s
adolescents are abusing prescription pain medications like Vicodin ... 
Skeleton of French man found in bed after 15 years
Police in France said on Friday they were trying to identify the skeleton of a man believed to have lain undiscovered in bed for more than 15 years.
The body, found in an abandoned house in the northern city of Lille, is thought to be that of the elderly owner of the property, who lived alone and appeared to have no relatives.
Police said they had found piles of unopened mail at the house dating back to 1996.
The body, found in an abandoned house in the northern city of Lille, is thought to be that of the elderly owner of the property, who lived alone and appeared to have no relatives.
Police said they had found piles of unopened mail at the house dating back to 1996.
Twenty Lonely Benches Around the World
These benches all feature views that will make you long to spend some
time on them – especially if you're seeking a bit of solitude. More
Einstein with puppet-Einstein
Attributed to Harry Burnett while Yale Puppeteers were working in their theater, Teatro Torito, on Olvera Street in Los Angeles, California, circa 1931. The photo was taken by Harry Burnett at Cal Tech in Pasadena where Albert Einstein was teaching. Einstein saw the puppet perform at the Teato Torito and was quite amused. He reached into his jacket’s breast pocket, pulled out a letter and crumpled it up. Speaking in German, he said, “The puppet wasn’t fat enough!” He laughed and stuffed the crumpled letter up under the smock to give the puppet a fatter belly. This is a wonderful photograph that Harry treasured. Harry Burnett also kept the letter in a frame and loved to retell the story and at the end give his pixish laugh.Einstein with Einstein Puppet
The Denge Sound Mirrors
Radar's Predecessor
Quickly superseded by radar they were abandoned but still remain at their post, obsolete concrete leviathans on an island in the middle of a nature reserve, reminders of a dangerous time in European history.
Solar wind is source for moon water
Three
years ago University of Tennessee, Knoxville, researchers helped to
discover water on the surface of the moon. Now, they ...The Strange Lunar Beauty of the Algerian Sahara
As these stunning photos show, Tassili n’Ajjer in the Sahara Desert of
Algeria is an area of breathtaking beauty, just one reason why it is a
UNESCO World Heritage Site. More
A shaman's "aarnguat"
The first unusual thing we noticed were holes in the figurine’s head, chest, and pelvis. We were uncertain why these modifications, carefully created using a bow drill, had been made to an otherwise typical Inuit female figurine, so we examined the associated skeleton. We discovered skeletal abnormalities in locations corresponding with the holes in the figurine, the most obvious being a jaw lesion that was probably cancerous. While we can’t determine what kind of cancer the woman may have had, lung and salivary gland cancer (once known as Eskimoma because it is common in Inuit populations) are possibilities. The chest and pelvic perforations may relate to these soft tissue cancers or other skeletal problems. For instance, her pelvis was asymmetrical, suggesting misaligned bones that could have produced chronic pain in the buttocks.From the September/October 2010 issue of Archaeology.
Traditional Inuit religion conceived of everything—people, animals, objects, and places—as possessing an inua, or resident soul, and Inuit shamans sometimes made figurines called aarnguat (“object with powers”) to host an inua. We believe that this aarnguat was specifically made for the woman’s inua so that it could act as a proxy for her during a shamanic “surgery,” represented by the three drilled holes, to remove her illnesses. It is the first definitive archaeological evidence for shamanistic healing in the Canadian Arctic.
The Achaemenid Empire (4th century B.C.)
By ensuring peace and promoting trade, the Achaemenids ushered in an unprecedented period of prosperity in a vast area half a millennium before Rome reached the apex of its power. At its peak, the empire covered three million square miles—more than that of either Rome or the Chinese Han Dynasty at their largest in the first century A.D.From the September/October 2011 issue of Archaeology [online is not fulltext], via the author's website. [which is fulltext with photos].
The taxes gathered from conquered peoples allowed the Achaemenids to create monumental cities, build dependable roads stretching from Anatolia to Afghanistan, and construct caravan stops to protect and encourage merchants, as well as to ensure royal couriers could travel quickly across long distances. The Royal Road, from Sardis in today’s Turkey to Susa in today’s Iran, provided regular way stations through territory “free from danger,” says the fifth-century b.c. Greek historian Herodotus.
And this from the Wikipedia entry:
In 480 BCE, it is estimated that 50 million people lived in the Achaemenid Empire or about 44% of the world's population at the time, making it the largest empire by population percentage.
First Human Ancestor Looked Like A Squirrel
The fossils, described in a presentation at the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology's 72nd Annual Meeting in Raleigh, North Carolina, are the first known below-the-head bones for Purgatorius. Previously, only teeth revealed its existence.
here's further evidence that dinosaurs were not ectothermic (cold-blooded).
Dinosaur cold-blood theory in doubt
One of the strongest lines of evidence that dinosaurs were cold-blooded, like modern reptiles, has been knocked down.
Prior studies of dinosaur bones uncovered what are known as "lines of arrested growth".The creatures were presumed to be cold-blooded because modern cold-blooded animals show these same lines.
But scientists reporting in Nature have studied the bones of 41 modern mammal species from around the world, finding every one had these lines as well.
The idea that dinosaurs are cold-blooded, or ectothermic, goes back to the 19th Century. But a number of discoveries 1960s have been challenging that notion.
Because soft tissues such as organs and skin are not preserved (with a few notable exceptions), much of what is known about dinosaurs must be inferred from their bones, and comparisons made with modern animals that can be studied in greater detail.
Lagging behind Lines of arrested growth, or Lags, occur because organisms tend to suspend their growth and rally their resources during seasonal periods of environmental stress such as cold or dry conditions.
This forms a boundary from one season to the next as growth resumes when conditions are more favourable.
Lags have also been found in the bones of reptiles and amphibians and have until now been assumed to be limited to ectotherms - cold-blooded animals - that are more subject to the whims of harsh environments.
Meike Koehler of the Catalan Institute of Palaeontology in Barcelona and her colleagues were therefore surprised by what they found.
"Originally this was not a paper that we aimed to do," Dr Koehler told BBC News.
"We were very curious to know how environmental conditions and changes affect bone growth in fossil and extant mammals, to get a good idea about... how they may have coped with these changes in the past."
As the team studied the thigh bones of animals from all over the world - ranging from the Svalbard reindeer in the Arctic to muntjac deer species from South Asia - Lags showed up in every one.
"These lines of arrested growth have been used a lot in dinosaurs, but nobody has ever had a really deep look at mammals," Dr Koehler explained.
"I think most (palaeontologists) regard dinosaurs as being [warm-blooded] but there's a lot of waffling in the data that appeared before that wasn't conclusive," he told BBC News.
"It's about time we have a connection between the modern bone histology and fossil bone histology, through a very nice ecological and metabolic comparison."
While Prof Weishampel considers it a closed case, Dr Koehler herself is more reserved about the result.
"I don't think that this debate is really settled," she said. "But this is the first time that you can say that Lags do not say anything about warm- or cold-bloodedness."
She and her team will go on and put the Lags to use in studies of modern animals instead.
"It's like dendrochronology - the rings in trees. You can do skeletal chronology in bones and infer things like longevity, age at maturity, juvenile states - traits which are very, very important to get an idea about the health of a population and whether it is vulnerable.
"It is very good to know now that mammals do show these Lags and we can use them in the same way that we do in amphibians and reptiles to understand the situation of a population."
Blood Ivory
Despite a global ban on the ivory trade, elephants are still being killed just for their tusks. In most developed countries, the use of ivory (outside of antiques) is about as chic as clubbing a baby seal. So who is buying ivory these days? Bryan Christy of National Geographic looks for answers in the Philippines.
My goal in meeting Garcia is to understand his country’s ivory trade and possibly get a lead on who was behind 5.4 tons of illegal ivory seized by customs agents in Manila in 2009, 7.7 tons seized there in 2005, and 6.1 tons bound for the Philippines seized by Taiwan in 2006. Assuming an average of 22 pounds of ivory per elephant, these seizures represent about 1,745 elephants. According to the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), the treaty organization that sets international wildlife trade policy, the Philippines is merely a transit country for ivory headed to China. But CITES has limited resources. Until last year it employed just one enforcement officer to police more than 30,000 animal and plant species. Its assessment of the Philippines doesn’t square with what Jose Yuchongco, chief of the Philippine customs police, told a Manila newspaper not long after making a major seizure in 2009: “The Philippines is a favorite destination of these smuggled elephant tusks, maybe because Filipino Catholics are fond of images of saints that are made of ivory.” On Cebu the link between ivory and the church is so strong that the word for ivory, garing, has a second meaning: “religious statue.”But it's not just the Philippines. Read more about the continuing global ivory trade at NatGeo.
Zookeepers perform mouth to snout resuscitation to save newborn tapir
Staff at Denver Zoo saved the life of a Malayan tapir calf when they
took extraordinary efforts during a recent birth. Rinny, the zoo's
female tapir, was having trouble while giving birth to a calf last month
and a staffer freed the newborn from the mother's amniotic sac. After
successfully helping to extract the calf, zoo members aided the newborn by performing "mouth to snout rescue breaths," the zoo has said.
The staff helped the calf get liquid out of his lungs and breathe. "It's always a little scary when something like this happens, but thankfully we all have great resources and training," said Rebecca McCloskey, an assistant curator with the zoo. McCloskey, along with staff veterinarian Gwen Jankowski, took the life-saving measures during the difficult birth on Sept. 3.
Now the male tapir named Dumadi is doing fine, walking and swimming as he grows at the zoo. Rinny is also doing well after the birth, which the first tapir birth for at Denver Zoo. Adult Malayan tapirs have a distinctive color pattern that resembles an Oreo cookie, with black front and back parts separated by a white or grey midsection, the release said. The coloring provides excellent camouflage that breaks up a tapir's outline in forest shadows.
Young tapirs have color patterns that more resemble brown watermelons with spots and stripes, which help them blend into the dappled sunlight and leaf shadows of the forest, protecting them from predators. Malayan tapirs are the only tapir native to Asia. Once found throughout Southeast Asia, they now inhabit only the rainforests of the Indochinese peninsula and Sumatra. With a wild population of less than 2,000, they're classified as endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature.
The staff helped the calf get liquid out of his lungs and breathe. "It's always a little scary when something like this happens, but thankfully we all have great resources and training," said Rebecca McCloskey, an assistant curator with the zoo. McCloskey, along with staff veterinarian Gwen Jankowski, took the life-saving measures during the difficult birth on Sept. 3.
Now the male tapir named Dumadi is doing fine, walking and swimming as he grows at the zoo. Rinny is also doing well after the birth, which the first tapir birth for at Denver Zoo. Adult Malayan tapirs have a distinctive color pattern that resembles an Oreo cookie, with black front and back parts separated by a white or grey midsection, the release said. The coloring provides excellent camouflage that breaks up a tapir's outline in forest shadows.
Young tapirs have color patterns that more resemble brown watermelons with spots and stripes, which help them blend into the dappled sunlight and leaf shadows of the forest, protecting them from predators. Malayan tapirs are the only tapir native to Asia. Once found throughout Southeast Asia, they now inhabit only the rainforests of the Indochinese peninsula and Sumatra. With a wild population of less than 2,000, they're classified as endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature.
Great apes, small numbers
Sumatran
orangutans have undergone a substantial recent population decline,
according to a new genetic study, but the same research revealed ...
Saturday, October 20, 2012
The Daily Drift
The eye of the eagle ...
Some of our readers today have been in:
Minsk, Belarus
Doha, Qatar
Kuching, Malaysia
Lima, Peru
Thanh Pho Ho Chi Minh, Vietnam
George Town, Malaysia
Dubai, United Arab Emirates
Reykjavik, Iceland
Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
Cairo, Egypt
Lahore, Pakistan
Seremban, Malaysia
Manila, Philippines
Caracas, Venezuela
Seri Kembangan, Malaysia
Zagreb, Croatia
Sampaloc, Philippines
Miri, Malaysia
Karachi, Pakistan
Bucharest, Romania
Kota Kinabalu, Malaysia
Velikiy Novgorod, Russia
Colombo, Sri Lanka
Klang, Malaysia
Bangkok, Thailand
San Juan, Puerto Rico
Ampang, Malaysia
Osijek, Croatia
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
